Thursday, May 26, 2016

Headines below the fold

Cattle belching and farting causes methane, and methane increases global warming, so our masters are condemning eating beef

But the latest fad is pseudo medicine is intestinal flora (aka normal germs in your gut), so now "experts" say antibiotics "could" increase methane emission.

 (note: here in the Philippines, beef is expensive, and the best beef is imported from New Zealand or Australia, although there is a small beef/milk industry here now. We usually eat chicken and fish, and our "beef" is tough overaged waterbuffalo who the owners decided to sell and replace with a handplow etc. And our milk is also from waterbuffalo).

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Did Obama really go to Vietnam and tell them to stay in their life of poverty to help prevent global warming? Or am I overreading that part about "sustainable development" as meaning stay poor?

 If we’re going to ensure the health of our people and the beauty of our planet, then development has to be sustainable.  Natural wonders like Ha Long Bay and Son Doong Cave have to be preserved for our children and our grandchildren.  Rising seas threaten the coasts and waterways on which so many Vietnamese depend.  And so as partners in the fight against climate change, we need to fulfill the commitments we made in Paris, we need to help farmers and villages and people who depend on fishing to adapt and to bring more clean energy to places like the Mekong Delta -- a rice bowl of the world that we need to feed future generations.
so, is "sustainable" development introducing handplows, herbicides instead of flooding the rice paddies, using fertilizer and GM seeds, or does it mean continuing the methane producing flooded rice paddies with the methane producing water buffalo to plow the field?

A lot of the tech development in VN is from their ex pats going home, and starting companies with the help of IBM etc.

But poverty is still terrible in rural areas, which is why women there often become mail order brides voluntarily or are kidnapped for Chinese men to marry because their population control policies resulted in all those excess single men.

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America and the left are turning against Israel. Lots of lamenting about those evil Israelis destroying the houses of innocent Palestinians...

Well, not exactly.

StrategyPage report on the corruption in the region, and points out how it pertains to war.

For those who lament all those houses destroyed by Israel in the last war, they point out a nasty fact:the houses were destroyed because rockets and tunnels were built in civilian areas, and the money to rebuild them (from foreign aid donors) is either going in the pockets of politicians or diverted to rebuild the war machine.

The corruption in the West Bank and Gaza is bad, but also different. Fatah leadership are traditional crooks, stealing money (most of it contributed by foreign aid donors) for themselves and their key supporters. Hamas does less of that and more diversion of aid money to build military capabilities. This means stealing a lot of foreign aid to finance the importation or local manufacture of rockets as well as rebuilding the 32 tunnels destroyed by Israel during the 2014 war.
Hamas believes its new tunnels will better survive the next war but most Gazans are not as optimistic. Civilians who know (or fear) that a new tunnel is near their home believe they will be the target of Israeli smart bombs if Hamas starts another war. This is particularly true if a tunnel entrance is nearby.
Civilians are also unhappy with the Hamas policy of storing rockets in residential neighborhoods, usually in basements or bunkers modified for that purpose. Most Gazans remember that the 2014 war destroyed 9,000 homes, mainly because Hamas stored weapons or stationed gunmen in residential areas. Few of those homes have been rebuilt while most of the tunnels have, plus additional tunnels and bunkers. 
of course, for the anti war left, truth is just something to ignore, like the massacres by their friends elsewhere.

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Inconvenient fact: Yes, there is still poverty, but there is a lot less thanks to capitalism and the global economy.

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someone tell the Pope...

headsup SenseofEvents
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Doctors pressured to use opium based narcotics to treat pain, now are pressured to let patients hurt.

There is a big differnence between opiods for chronic pain (which keeps people functioning) and taking them to get high. And a lot of overdoses are from stolen pain pills, not by those who need them for arthritis, lupus, cancer, etc. True, some people do both, but what do you do? We used a pain contract for these patients.

and people forget that there is no good alternative: Tyelnol doesn't work well and NSAIDS have their own side effects on the liver, kidney, and cause GI Bleeds...
and chronic pain causes people not to go out and exercize/socialize, and also is associated with depression and other health problems

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Gay activist speech shut down by threats of violence at "catholic" university. Rent-a-cops refuse to protect speaker.

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Beer was a common in Mesopotamia and Egypt, but now a Chinese find says they drank it too.

link2

Beer was safer than germ filled water that could kill you until recent times, and may have been the reason that hunter gatherers decided to chuck it all and farm.
How beer invented civilization.
and saved the world:











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